As far as I can say, no. Perhaps others will contradict me. What I know is the company was "stuck" with its aging fleet of 747-100 and some early -200B as well as L-1011s. There were plans to have an A330 fleet but that didn't materialize. TWA didn't have money. It's only during the '90s that it expended the 767 fleet with some -300ER. and retired the Tristars in 1997.

They had ordered A330's however. This was back in the late 80's or early 90's so they would have been relatively early customers. The order was deferred and delayed until it was eventually swapped for a never delivered A318/19/20/21 order.

In reality TWA probably knew that the B744 was too much aircraft for them. They had sold the only routes that could have supported them (LHR-JFK/LAX) and their once mighty transatlantic network was a shadow of its former self. For the last few years they were down to a few B763's and B757's across the atlantic

Many at TWA would have loved to have ordered the 747-400 when it came on the market in the late 1980s. The problem is that TWA was so strapped financially that it could never have afforded it.

When Carl Icahn bought TWA in January of 1986 in a hostile takeover, he worked with the investment bank Drexel-Burnham-Lambert to raise cash for the deal using junk bonds, which are very high risk securities which require the seller to pay a high rate of interest. Once Icahn was in charge of TWA, that airline's operation had to pay back the interest on the bonds. So as United and Northwest were writing checks to Boeing to pay for their new 747-400s, TWA paid almost $500 million in interest on the takeover financing in 1989. Add that to the overall weaknesses in TWA's route system that made it very hard to generate premium revenue, and you end up with a situation in which the carrier could not obtain the airplanes it needed to be an effective competitor. And once Icahn forced the airline to sell the LHR routes in 1991, the 747-400 would likely not even have had a place at TWA, as the remaining routes all faced steep competition and would not have warranted an airplane that size.

They had ordered A330's however. This was back in the late 80's or early 90's so they would have been relatively early customers. The order was deferred and delayed until it was eventually swapped for a never delivered A318/19/20/21 order.

Guys, there is nothing wrong with rediscussing a topic 12 years later. Cut the OP some slack.

Back to the point, TWA was in a long, slow demise. Not sure why...they had a good route structure to Europe and they had a midwest hub.

Bad decisions, bad leaderhip, tough unions all led to a painfully slow death of a great airline. While Eastern and Pan Am enjoyed a quicker death with only a decade of turmoil, TWA really went through the wringer.

Towards the end, they were a one hub airline (STL) in a city with little O&D. They had a small gateway in NY (JFK) that operated out of an ancient terminal with ancient airplanes and played second fiddle to DL and AA until they shrunk so much they were near irrelevant in the NY market.

They basically wasted away until there was nothing left and then died. Very sad.

Had they survived, they would have been a one hub airline with a few small focus cities in JFK, SJU, and LAX.

Today, their fleet would have consisted of Airbuses, 717s, a few remaining MD 80s and some 757/767s.

Quoting jfklganyc (Reply 7):TWA was in a long, slow demise. Not sure why...they had a good route structure to Europe and they had a midwest hub.

Like Pan Am, TW had difficulties to fill tgeir large fleet of 747 except perhaps during summers. Then came deregulation and thus TWA core network, the Atlantic, faced many new competitors and the fares that were going down. Just like PA, TW wasn't ready for that new reality.

Quoting jfklganyc (Reply 7):While Eastern and Pan Am enjoyed a quicker death with only a decade of turmoil

Pan Am slow death started as soon as Trippe retired. There was a leadership between his tenure and the arrival of Seawell and although with the latter there were some ups, in the end Pan Am was doomed to fail, especially after the Pacific Division sale.

The TWA of 1970 had a need for the 747-100, the 1990 version was in a twin engine world with the A330 that were sadly never delivered. Other then JFK and LAX to LHR TWA didn't have route needing that big an airplane. The Tel Aviv route could ahve also used a 744. The 747-400 was a Pacific 747, though the bigger European airlines used to on the Atlantic. IT wouldn't have made sense for BA, KLM, LH and AF to have a Asian fleet and an Atlantic one too.

In addition to their A330 order, TWA was also supposed to be the worldwide launch customer for the Rolls-Royce Trent 700. That never happened either, though the Trent is now the most popular powerplant for the A330.

Speaking of which, CX later became the first to put Trents on their A330s after TWA kept deferring their order.

If TWA had survived another year or two, the airline would have been very healthy. The karabu contract was nearly done, and TW would have been generating great profits. No doubt the fleet would have been nice today. Add in all the merger mania, TWA would have likely been merged. I wonder why America West never took a bid? That sure would have been an interesting combination.

Quoting F9animal (Reply 14):If TWA had survived another year or two, the airline would have been very healthy.

TWA would have been decimated in the 9/11 aftermath, and struggled right along with everyone else in the ensuing years, if by some miracle they could have survived. As much as I liked to fly TWA, even I'm a realist that if AA hadn't bought them when they did, there would have been nothing left of TWA flying anywhere, not even a focus city in STL for the years that survived.

Quoting warden145 (Reply 19):it seems to me that people are coming down unnecessarily hard

When you count the number of repetitive threads on the same subject, over and over, the reaction isn't really that harsh. It's disrespectful to those who've contributed in past threads to not at least link the previous thread in the OP, asking for an update, instead of treating the contributions made in the past as if they didn't matter.

The question was answered way back then, but TWA wouldn't have needed 747s. For starters, in the late 1990s the airline began to center around domestic flights rather than longhaul and the A330s would have been able to handle those few international flights.

Did you guys read his post? He's talking if TWA had remained in a healthy financial position past 2001, as in, if the airline had been around to see the start of the merger mania era in 2005 when US and HP merged. TWA was nearing bankruptcy again when AMR struck a deal to buy it out.

TWA's president in the 1960s and 1970s, Charles Tillinghast, said in the book "The Sporty Game" that TWA did not need the 747 in the 1970s, and he wished the airline had skipped the 747, and standardized on the L-1011 or DC-10 as their only wide body.

It was very easy to make money with 747s pre-deregulation in the summer, but very hard to fill them the rest of the year.

The only pitfall with Tillinghast's reasoning is that early models of the L-1011 lacked transatlantic range. In the late 1970s, after Rolls Royce worked the bugs out of the RB-211 and was able to make the engines more powerful, TWA upgraded some of their US domestic fleet of TriStars so they could be used on transatlantic routes from the East Coast. The only model of L-1011 that could fly LHR-LAX was the short fuselage L-1011-500, which did not enter service until around 1980, and which TWA did not operate.